Rooms 1.0 Released and Roadmap

After almost 22 months since our initial commit on the Rooms project we are happy to announce a 1.0 release! We are really proud of this release as it brings together a rich set of features built on a flexible core that can grow and improve over time. Our central objective with Rooms is to provide absolutely the best tool for creating booking experiences on hotel websites with an open-source solution. We want to free up accommodation owners to actually own and define that experience for their users and do that in a way that is unique to them. There are three key ingredients that come together to achieve this. Drupal - undoubtedly one of the strongest CMS’s out there, it allows us to construct truly elegant websites. Commerce - a powerful Drupal-based open-source ecommerce solution that enables us to offer flexible and sophisticated checkout experiences for our users. Rooms - it tightly integrates with Commerce adding the booking and room management layer dealing with a range of situations and features. Put these three things together and you get Drupal Rooms. What, we believe, currently represents one of the most flexible open-source booking solutions out there. Check out our screencast for an overview of what is possible.

Rooms 1.0 Demo - Hotel Booking Management.

Rooms 1.0, however, is just the first step for us.

Roadmap

Now that we have a stable core to built on top we are going to focus on two key areas.

Developing Rooms 1.x

Usability Enhancements Expect a constant stream of usability enhancements on the Rooms 1.0 branch. We want to not only have the most powerful booking solution but also the easiest to use. We already have great ideas about wizards to enable you to setup your Rooms-based hotel. More use cases It sometimes feels that there are as many feature requirements as there are hotels out there. Inspired by the Commerce ecosystem expect to see features added to the core but also add-on modules that will enable you to do more. We have a couple in the making that we can’t wait to share with everyone.

Rooms 2.x

At the same time we will be working on a 2.x branch of Rooms. The focus here will be on growing Rooms in two directions. Multiple Hotels and Hotel Owners We want a module that will allow you to build in Drupal a site that can host multiple hotels with multiple hotel owners managing them. Beyond Room Bookings While Rooms right now is focused on just hotel nightly bookings we believe we can expand the core engine to handle both more fine-grained bookings (e.g. hours-based) as we well as larger bookings (e.g. minimum of a week).

The Rooms Sites are Coming!

Last but certainly not least we have a host of Drupal Rooms sites in the works. We will be sharing those (and the code so you can get a head-start with your own sites) before Drupalcon Portland - yes, I know in just a few days! Drop us a line if you want to discuss any of the above. We are looking forward to helping people build their hotel/accomodation sites and the comments, feature requests and bug reports that we have been getting so far were instrumental to making Rooms a great booking solution.